There is a weird-looking three-story office building on West Pico Boulevard just north of the Santa Monica Freeway in Santa Monica that its denizens call "the Apatower."

In the bottom floor, Lena Dunham, the creator of the new HBO series "Girls," her show-runner Jenni Konner and six writers met frequently over the winter months to sketch out the second season of the show. In the upper floors are the offices of Apatow Productions, the center of Judd Apatow's Hollywood output, including TV shows "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared" and movies like Bridesmaids and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

It was largely through Apatow's efforts that Dunham had gotten herself a series on HBO, and assembled her team, and wrote 10 episodes in the ground floor of the Apatower.

Throughout the writing of Season 1, Apatow worked very closely with Dunham and Konner on the storylines, and was present while much of the shooting went on, giving advice and calling for changes. Through all of it, Dunham, Konner declared to The Huffington Post, was "made of magic."

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But as much as a month before the show aired, critics had seen the first three episodes, and there was some feedback. Most of the published material on "Girls" at that early date had been adoring (and broad). But through back-channels other messages must have resonated with Dunham and her writers. Dunham told The Huffington Post on April 9, almost a week before the first episode aired:

We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go "Hashtag white people problems, guys." I think that's really important to be aware of. Because it can seem really rarefied. When I get a tweet from a girl who's like, "I'd love to watch the show, but I wish there were more women of color." You know what? I do, too, and if we have the opportunity to do a second season, I'll address that.

It's evidence that Dunham and her team were at least somewhat prepared for what would happen after the night of the premiere, April 15; that's when "Girls" became a real thing, a grown-up in the intense and very grown-up world of really existing television, and therefore in a way not magic at all.

I'm so into all the love for #GIRLS and even the hate is kind of awesome. Thank you excellent watchers of tv.

Two episodes of "Girls" have aired on HBO. But the entire first season of 10 episodes is already in the can; the second, substantially written. (Shooting begins in mid-May.) Many critics have seen the whole first season; many have not. But both camps have been outspoken. Those who have seen all of Season 1 do not seem to be particularly anxious to reassure viewers just to wait, that the show diversifies later on. A post on the website Racialicious by Kendra James (titled "Dear Lena Dunham: I Exist") found the casting-call announcements for "Girls" for April and May of 2011. (See below.)

James argues that the show is unrealistic, in that Dunham's world simply would not be so white: She and her friends live in Brooklyn, which is only a third white; and James herself went to the same small liberal arts school, Oberlin, and came afterward to New York to be a writer.

Where nonwhite people do come in, they do seem like they have little to offer but one to three lines in which they are hanging out on stoops "making a comment on Hannah's appearance," or grandmotherly nannies, or "sexy" young nannies, or "overweight" Jamaican-accented nannies. In the first episode racial diversity comes by way of a cheerful Asian woman who nabs the fulltime position at the book publisher where she and Hannah were both unpaid interns because she knows PhotoShop, and a black man who seems to be homeless and offers some Magic Negro wisdom.

It does seem fairly unrealistic that there would be so few people of color in the worlds in which Lena Dunham's character and her friends move about: Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, literary circles.

My chief beef is not simply that the girls in "Girls" are white. I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember – which, in mixed people speak means biracial. But the problem with "Girls" is that while the show reaches — and succeeds, in many ways — to show female characters that are not caricatures, it feels alienating, a party of four engineered to appeal to a very specific subset of the television viewing audience, when the show has the potential to be so much bigger than that. And that is a huge fucking disappointment.

Because these girls on "Girls" are like us, they are like me and they are like you, they are beautiful, they are ballsy, they are trying to figure it out. They have their entire lives ahead of them and I can’t wait to see what happens next. I just wish I saw a little more of myself on screen, right alongside them.

One of the writers on the show, Leslie Arfin, tweeted later that evening: "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." (The tweet was later deleted.)

It's been noted that Arfin is a veteran of the Vice publishing empire, a hip magazine that specializes in provocation; its history of political incorrectness on race matters is worth very little of your time or attention, except to say, in the spirit of David Letterman on another topic, "I have a theory about Madonna: I believe she likes to shock us." Benjamin Leo, a fellow traveler of Arfin's and a writer for the similar-minded website Street Carnage, wrote approvingly:

Brilliant.

UGGGGG, but now watch as the writers are forced to acquiesce and add some phony token Black Rhodes Scholar to appease these morons. Guys, you’ve kept it SO real—please don’t suck their balls. It’s 2012 and Obama’s in the White House: the McCarthyism 2.0 witch-hunting mob has been disarmed! They have no power over you! TELL YOUR STORY."

ARFIN'S RESPONSE TO THE CRITICISM HAS BEEN ATYPICAL of the show's creative team, but most of what Dunham, and executive producer Judd Apatow, have said about the matter seems to have been either vague or to result in promises to "improve" the show.

Whatever else is true, "Girls" has somehow become an obsession, and for both the old media and the internet, a crucible for forming an idea of what's happening right now. Its ommissions, its failures, its successes are all pointed to as affirmations of greater truths about society, whether its about a new glass ceiling for people of color, the narcissism or troubling sexual mores or troubling digital mediation of the ideas of "today's young people," or the situation for women now (good or bad or whatever).

Watching the first two episodes of the show, I found it much smaller than that; funny, and kind of slight.

But I wanted to get behind all of this a bit and figure out how the show actually works. So I called an old colleague, Deborah Schoeneman, who is one of the writers on the show.

"The thing about [network] TV, what's often happening is you are breaking the story of an episode in the showroom, and you're shooting another episode," she told me over the phone from Los Angeles. "Episodes can air and then you react to it, and it's like, you can be like, 'fans want to see more of this character!' So you decide whether you want to react to that.

"So on 'Revenge' they can see what the fans are saying and if they want to react to it they can react to it. Cable is its own animal, and it very much has a lot more to do with the creative vision of the creator."

An entire season will be bought, written, shot and produced before the first episode airs.

Schoeneman said the writers, Dunham and Konner knew from the start that the show would get talked about.

"We knew that there was going to be a backlash of sorts," Schoeneman said. "It's like some sort of law of gravity: If you get enough attention? Angelina Jolie is really famous and some people love her and some people hate her. That is not surprising that there are people who have lots of positive and lots of negative things to say about the show."

But:

"I think what I am surprised at is the vast diversity of people that are interested in talking about the show," she said. "I knew that women in their 20s and 30s were gonna want to talk about the show, but the diversity of the people who are weighing in surprised me."

There are six writers on the show. Arfin is one; she's known mostly for writing for Vice and co-writing books that have introductions by Chloe Sevigny, who as a star of the movie Kids is possibly the original source of the whole Vice-American Apparel aesthetic.

There's Schoeneman, a journalist and writer (and fellow real-estate columnist with me at The New York Observer a little more than a decade ago) who worked on the "reboot" of 90210.

There's screenwriter and cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, whose style under the signature BEK is familiar to readers of The New Yorker but whose behind-the-scenes credits include being a staff writer on "Seinfeld" and a writer and producer of "Six Feet Under."

There's Murray Miller, a California native whose credits include "King of the Hill" and "Committed" but who went to New York University.

And presently working on the show, too, is Steve Rubinshteyn, who for the first season was Dunham's assistant.

All are white, Schoeneman said, but all are not typical writers for a hit show.

"I think that what Lena and Jenni were interested in were writers who had a lot of real-life experience," said Schoeneman. "They were not interested in a lot of writers who had lots of credits. They were interested in getting a diverse group of people and people who had a lot of life experience, people who were interested in sharing their life experiences, who were oversharers, if you want."

The writers room at the bottom floor of the Apatower (and the constant email and conference-call system in place when they are not gathered together) are "places where people could be very comfortable telling some secret about themselves that would help write the characters," Schoeneman said.

It's perhaps a little reductive to suggest that one of the reasons the show appears to many to lack diversity is because it is so personal, and because none of the writers have personal experience of being anything but white.

"The majority of most writers rooms are white, the majority of most magazines are white," Schoeneman pointed out.

But, on the other hand, the majority of most writers rooms have not been commissioned to write so forthrightly from personal experience.

"It's not like each one of us has a character or each one of us has a specialty," Schoeneman said. "It's like each one of us has a background … and it's a crew that she's assembled to figure out what she needs."

Of course it's not entirely personal stories.

Schoeneman, who has been a reporter for The New York Observer, The New York Post and New York magazine, and has run glossy magazines on the Hamptons, and has also been a novelist, feels that her position was a particular one. As a reporter, she was always telling other people's stories, so she had not just her own experiences, but the experiences of people she'd interviewed over time to help her come up with ideas for the show.

"They are not always my own stories but I have a lot of stories to share about other people, because I was very out and about as a journalist," she said. "There are lots of things I saw in New York that … I would never have had access to just being me, but as a journalist I did."

But they are stories with a certain specificity, that the writers bring their personal knowledge of in order to make them fit with the feeling of the show, which is extremely personal. The feeling of being inside Hannah's head, and seeing everything through her eyes—almost of an estrangement one feels from oneself—is perhaps one of the reasons the show's diversity is called out so vigorously, when so many other shows with even more improbable lack of diversity, or offensive deployments of diversity ("30 Rock" is mentioned in many discussion threads about diversity on "Girls," because after all: Tracy Morgan? Subas the janitor? Alec's West Indian nanny? The Jamaican assistants at Liz Lemon's dentists?) that play on stereotypes but somehow do not seem to detonate the shows themselves.

It's also probably part of the reason others, who have not concentrated on the matter of diversity, have used the word "narcissistic" to describe the show.

And why another whole contingent of young women (and some not so young) is enthusiastically embracing the show.

I think storytellers--first and foremost--must pledge their loyalty to the narrative as it comes to them. I don't believe in creating characters out a of desire to please your audience or even to promote an ostensible social good. I think good writing is essentially a selfish act--story-tellers are charged with crafting the narrative the want to see. I'm not very interested in Lena Dunham reflecting the aspirations of people she may or may not know. I'm interested in her specific and individual vision; in that story she is aching to tell. If that vision is all-white, then so be it. I don't think a story-teller can be guilted into making great characters.

But there's a combination punch, too: Shows like "Girls" ought to include more diversity because, the fact is, the world of Hannah would be more diverse in real life than it appears in the show. Not reflecting that diversity appears to be a positive act of erasure.

It's clear that a great deal of thought goes into the authenticity of the show, but it's a kind of authenticity that we've been hearing about in another context: It's something like the "personal truth" touted by James Frey. And in some ways, the dispute over "Girls" gives the lie to the old idea that if Frey's self-proclaimed "memoir" A Million Little Pieces had simply been called a novel, and proffered as a roman-a-clef, the distortions and misrepresentations of his biography inside would have been unproblematic.

There are practical limitations to the "authenticity" achievable on television, of course.

So Schoeneman says, for example, "We might write a scene at night on the waterfront on a boat, and someone will say, 'We can't do it at night, it's a nightmare, can we make it indoors at a restaurant and we can fake that it is on the water?'"

But:

"If it's really important that it's a boat in the water in the middle of the night, if that is the most important thing that can happen with this character in this episode, then [they'll say], 'We'll do it, but just know it is gonna cost this much out of your budget."

And:

"If I said in the writers room, 'I really think that Hannah has an apartment on the Upper East Side because she wants to walk to work, it doesn't matter. She doesn't go there, she doesn't go to the Upper East Side. She doesn't want to be there."